The Attempt to Grow a Covid-19 Vaccine in Plants
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In the race to find a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine, researchers around the world are deploying a wide range of vaccine-making strategies, from the traditional to the theoretical. As science journalist Leslie Nemo writes in Future Human, a brand-new publication from Medium about the science shaping the survival of humanity, a small group of scientists is working with one particularly unusual method: They’re trying to grow vaccines in plants.
Tried-and-true methods for making vaccines involve infecting mammalian cells or chicken eggs with a virus, waiting for the viral particles to replicate, then harvesting them. Doing so can be expensive, time-consuming, and occasionally risky. Growing the vaccines in plants, writes Nemo, could solve all of those issues — if scientists can get it to work. Though researchers have been working on this technology for 30 years, so far there haven’t been any plant-based vaccines brought to market. There’s reason to think that could change.
In August, senior staff writer Emily Mullin wrote about another a similarly outside-the-box approach to vaccine making that involved delivering a set of genetic instructions to cells to teach them how to make a vaccine. These “genetic vaccines” have been in the works for decades, but scientists still haven’t been able to develop one for human use.
Despite the theoretical nature of these approaches, at least two companies in the Covid-19 vaccine race are known to be attempting plant-based vaccines, and several frontrunners — including Moderna, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, and Pfizer — are attempting to move a genetic vaccine to market. Now, for better or for worse, is the time to try.
